College sex crime fight gets push

Vice president wants to improve response and awareness at schools

By SCOTT WALDMAN Staff writer

Published 12:01 am, Thursday, April 7, 2011

The federal government is pushing colleges and universities to change how they respond to sexual assault on campus.

This week, Vice President Joe Biden and Education Secretary Arne Duncan kicked off an awareness campaign that will help educators prevent and respond to sexual assault cases, which often lead to an unsatisfactory resolution for victims who see their attackers walk away unpunished from campus judicial proceedings. The processes have little transparency or accountability and attackers often remain on campus, even if they are found guilty.

Last school year, a Skidmore College student dropped out in the aftermath of her 2009 assault by a classmate. She was made to sit through a four-hour session in which the student she accused of attacking her and a faculty member grilled her and tried to poke holes in her story. The accused student received no reprimand and was allowed to remain on campus.

The experience is common for victims.

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Sexual assault on college campuses is practically an epidemic and schools are woefully unequipped to handle them. About 20 percent of women will be assaulted while in college, according to the U.S. Education Department.

"As caring adults, as parents, and as leaders, we must deal the brutal truth. The facts surrounding these incidents are shocking," Biden said during the campaign announcement at the University of New Hampshire, which has one of the best campus sexual assault policies in the nation. "The misplaced sense of values and priorities in some of these cases is staggering. ... We have to do better, and we have to do better now."

Hundreds of Skidmore students held a rally last spring after the Times Union reported on the assault case and campus officials spent more than a year restructuring their assault response policy. President Philip Glotzbach has said the school would lead the nation in formulating a progressive assault policy that recognized the complexity of such cases.

Now, the school is putting the final tweaks on a new assault policy that rethinks the way victims are treated and begins educating incoming freshman. A new buzzword on campus is "effective consent," which basically means "you're engaged in agreed-upon behavior," said Rochelle Calhoun, dean of student affairs. The school is educating all new students in its sexual misconduct code.

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Skidmore has also restructured its hearing process of sexual misconduct cases so that the victim has the option of not being in the same room as the accused. The school is also training all students to look for behavior that could lead to sexual assault, so that they know to intervene if they see a young woman being plied with alcohol at a party.

Calhoun said Skidmore is one of a small group of colleges focusing on bystander training to make more students aware of their ability to prevent problems before they happen.

"These will always be a complex and controversial issue," she said. "This is an attempt to create an environment of safety."

As part of the new federal push, schools will receive letters and brief outlines of their duties under Title IX, the federal civil rights law banning sexual discrimination, harassment and violence.

The government letter advises schools that, to find a suspect guilty, the evidence does not need to be the same high standard applied in court cases, but instead refers to the likelihood of whether or not an event happened. Schools are also not allowed to penalize the victim for underage drinking.

The regulations are not new, but the effort to promote them is. Officials say schools need comprehensive guidelines for filing complaints, helping victims, disciplining perpetrators and monitoring campus climates in the wake of an attack.

"Every school would like to believe it is immune from sexual violence but the facts suggest otherwise," Duncan said in a statement.